[AG-TECH] Lights, camera, question

David Minor dminor at salud.unm.edu
Fri Sep 7 12:10:57 CDT 2001


So we're doing some final prep work on our room, and  I wanted to buzz a few questions to people to get their opinions and experiences.

Initially the room was pretty standard, with white walls and overhead flourescents. This caused some issues with our cameras (Sony Pan and Tilts), namely that the cameras "saw" a lot of the white walls and tried to compensate, causing people's faces and clothes to be shaded oddly (usually too dark).

On the advice of several people we painted our walls a darker color - sort of a plum shade. This seems to help tremendously. We also had a lighting expert come in and spec new lights. His recommendation was to install much higher speed flourescents, and have them installed at an angle facing away from the projection screen. This we have done and it also helped the room dynamics.

But - we are still less than pleased with our results - especially comparing it to how some of the other rooms out there look. Our primary problem is that when zoomed out as wide as possible (to see all audience members) the image quality is pretty bad - the whites and light colors especially are way too overpowering (most people's faces are washed out for instance).

So, to my question: what are people's thoughts about lighting in rooms? Is it something that they have worked on or changed and what have been the results. Alternatively, what about cameras? Is anyone using anything else that they think works better? Are we bumping up against the limitation of the optics or could it be soomething else?

Thanks in advance for any input!

david.




More information about the ag-tech mailing list